Into the Darkest Corner

  ‘Is that good?’

  I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes any longer. I got up and sat in his lap and kissed him, long and deep, feeling him respond even though he was hurting. Even though I’d hurt him by not saying yes. One of the idiots came in from the beer garden to replenish supplies and whistled at us, made some comment about a free show, but I didn’t stop. I don’t think Stuart even heard.

  In the end we went home to Talbot Street, straight up to the top floor, running up the stairs without me even checking the front door. Not even once. We ran into the flat and just about managed to slam the door behind us, shedding clothes all the way, not even making it to the bedroom but instead naked on the living room floor, and after that naked in the kitchen and for good measure naked in the bathroom too.

  Hours later, when it was dark and the breeze coming in through the window had turned cold, he whispered, ‘Keep it. Keep the ring, won’t you? Keep it until the not yet turns into a yes.’

  Tuesday 22 April 2008

  I woke up suddenly, asleep to wide awake in seconds. Heart pounding.

  What was it?

  Stuart stirred beside me, one hand lifted, on my arm, pulling me gently back down. ‘Hey,’ he murmured. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘I heard something,’ I said.

  ‘You were dreaming.’

  He fitted an arm around my middle. I lay back down, still, my heart still hammering. It had been a noise again, like before. A bang.

  Silence, just my heart, just Stuart’s breathing. Nothing else.

  It was no good. There was no way I was going to go back to sleep.

  I got out of bed, trying not to wake him up again, pulling on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Barefoot, I tiptoed out of the bedroom.

  The flat was in darkness. I looked down towards the front door. It looked back at me, solid, silent, reassuring. The front room was bright, orange lights from the streetlights below illuminating the ceiling. I crouched down and sat on one of the low windowsills, looking down into the street.

  It was utterly quiet, no movement, no cars. Not even a cat. The only sound was the distant drone of a plane, lights like stars flashing in the dark orange sky.

  I was just thinking about going back to bed when I heard it again. A bang. A thump, dull, like something soft falling a long way.

  It was in the house somewhere, downstairs. Somewhere below.

  I thought about waking Stuart. My anxiety levels were high, somewhere around a seventy or eighty. My fingers were shaking and my knees were unsteady as I stood up. I waited for more. Nothing.

  Fuck it, I couldn’t be doing this for the rest of my life. I was going to check.

  I padded in my bare feet to the door and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened it. The stairway was dark, chilly, with a draught coming up from the floors below. I waited for my heart to stop thudding quite so hard. There’s nothing to worry about, I told myself. It’s just our house. It’s just Stuart and me, there’s nobody there. Go and have a look.

  I went downstairs, leaving Stuart’s door open. There was light from the front door, below, and dull light from the window on the landing. Otherwise it was dark.

  When I was outside the door to my flat I stopped and waited, listened. Nothing at all.

  This was ridiculous.

  I went downstairs, one step at a time, keeping to the edge so it didn’t creak. The draught was worse now, almost a breeze. It lifted the hair on the back of my neck. Dank air, stale air – the scent of cold soil. The smell of graveyard earth.

  I could see the front door now, firmly shut. No sign that it had been opened.

  Then, suddenly – BANG – close by.

  Not loud, but certainly loud enough to make me jump. I crouched down so I could see through the banister to the door to Mrs Mackenzie’s flat.

  The door was open again. Wide open.

  Frozen to the spot, I looked into the inky blanket of blackness inside the flat. The noise I’d heard was like a cupboard door shutting. Echoing in the empty flat. Someone was inside.

  Breathing as deeply and slowly as I could, I tried to concentrate, to think. This was crazy. There couldn’t be anyone in there. If they were, they were fumbling around in the dark. Why didn’t they just put a light on? I hugged my knees and waited for the panic to ease off. Of course it would have been easier and quicker to go back upstairs, to shout for Stuart, to go and start checking my own flat to make sure it was safe. But I’d come all the way down the stairs on my own and I wasn’t going to give up now.

  ‘Cathy?’

  The voice behind me, right behind me, made me scream and jump. I screamed louder and harder than I’d thought possible.

  ‘Hey, it’s me, it’s okay – what on earth – ? Cathy, sorry, I didn’t mean to creep up on you.’

  I was shaking from head to foot, pressing myself against the far wall. I pointed at the open door, the yawning, gaping blackness. ‘I heard – I heard…’

  ‘It’s okay. Come on, take some breaths.’

  In addition to the panic I was furious.

  ‘What the fuck…?’ I said, when I could speak. ‘Why the hell didn’t you just say something? You just about gave me a fucking heart attack.’

  He shrugged. ‘I thought you might be sleepwalking.’

  ‘I’ve never fucking sleepwalked in my entire life.’

  ‘Well, what are you doing, then?’

  I looked at the doorway. If there was someone inside, we’d probably given whoever it was a fright. My scream alone must have woken up half the street.

  ‘I heard noises. I came to have a look. And – see – the door’s open. I bloody locked it. I locked it and I checked it. And now it’s open.’

  He made a tutting noise, an ‘oh, no, here we go again’ noise, and moved me out of the way. He went to the ground floor and turned the light on. We both blinked and shielded our eyes from the sudden brightness. The doorway still stood, black and empty. I could see a few feet of crazily patterned carpet.

  Stuart looked at me with a world-weary expression and stood in the doorway.

  ‘Hello?’ he shouted. ‘Anyone there?’

  Nothing, not a sound. He went inside.

  ‘Be careful,’ I said.

  The lights went on in the flat at few moments later. I crept down the stairs. Everything was suddenly less threatening with the lights on. Stuart was in Mrs Mackenzie’s living room, standing there next to the sofa in his boxers and bare feet. ‘There’s nobody here,’ he said. ‘See?’

  I could still feel a draught. ‘Look,’ I said.

  The bottom pane of glass in the kitchen door was broken, a wedge-shaped piece of glass about a foot wide smashed on the floor. Through it the smell of the garden, a night breeze, was breathing a chill onto the skin on my legs.

  ‘Don’t go closer,’ he said, ‘you might cut your feet.’ And then, ignoring his own advice, he went closer.

  ‘There’s fur on the glass at the top. Looks like that fox has been getting in.’

  ‘That bloody fox again,’ I said. ‘And do you think it used a hammer to smash the window?’

  He stood up and crossed the kitchen floor to me, avoiding the broken glass. ‘There’s nobody here,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back upstairs.’

  We shut the door, slammed it. Stuart wouldn’t let me check it. The latch had shot home, we’d both heard it. We went back upstairs and Stuart went back to bed. I sat in the kitchen with the lights on, drinking a cup of tea. My hands were still shaking, but even so I felt quite calm. I couldn’t believe I’d actually done it, gone down the stairs in the middle of the night, left the safe place, left Stuart’s bed, and gone out through the door and down the stairs.

  Despite the broken pane of glass, despite the fact that Mrs Mackenzie’s flat had clearly been broken into – and not just by a fox or any other animal for that matter, it had to have been a person – I felt calm and free and composed.

  And still angry. Not just that he’d sneaked up behind me, not just that he’
d made me scream and so alerted whoever it was who’d been in the flat, but that he thought I’d done it. He thought that I’d opened the door to the flat. He wouldn’t say it, but I saw it in his eyes.

  He was starting to doubt me, the same way Claire did, and Sylvia, and then the police, the judge, the doctors, everyone.

  I didn’t go back to bed. I put the television on and stayed up until it got light, half-watching, half-practising thinking about Lee. I was already wired; it didn’t seem hard to take a step further and test my anxiety levels to the extreme.

  I thought about him breaking into Mrs Mackenzie’s flat. I thought about him living down there, in the darkness, listening to Stuart and me in the flat upstairs, listening to us talking, listening to us making love. I thought about him and what he might be planning to do.

  When it got light, finally, I had tears on my face. I wasn’t panicking; my breathing was steady. Controlling it, the panic, was definitely getting easier.

  When I heard Stuart stirring I went to put the kettle on.

  I took him in a cup of tea.

  ‘You alright?’ he said, his voice sleep-slurred.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I scared you last night.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I’ll ring the management company later, get them to send someone over and fix that broken glass. And put another lock on the door. Okay?’

  ‘Sure. I’m going to go down and get ready for work.’

  He touched my arm. ‘Already? Come back to bed.’

  ‘It’s nearly seven. I’ll see you tonight, okay?’

  I kissed him. He rolled over in bed for another five minutes’ sleep and I left him to it, heading down the stairs to my own flat. The urge to start checking everything was still there, but now I always restricted it. Instead of checking the windows and doors, checking the curtains were exactly as I’d left them, I checked other things.

  If Stuart, or Alistair, or anyone else for that matter, had asked why I did it, why I checked, I would not have been able to explain. Nobody else would notice the things that I noticed, the little signs that Lee had been in here. The door was always locked, just as I’d left it, but that meant nothing. I couldn’t explain how I knew he’d been in here while I’d been away.

  I just knew.

  Wednesday 23 April 2008

  Stuart knocked on my door when he came up the stairs from work. I considered ignoring it, the way I’d ignored it the first time he knocked on my flat door, months and months ago.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  He looked tired. ‘You coming upstairs?’

  ‘No, I’ve got some work to do. I’m going to do that, then have an early night. Do you mind? I didn’t get much sleep last night. And you look just about done in.’

  ‘I am quite tired. Just come up for dinner. Just for an hour. Please?’

  I contemplated this for a moment.

  ‘I’ve got lamb fillet. I was going to do some kebabs with lemon and cumin, and rice.’

  I relented. He let me have five minutes to lock up. When I went up to the top flat he was already skewering bits of lamb.

  ‘I rang the management company,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I got some wine out of the fridge and the bottle opener from the cutlery drawer.

  ‘They were going to send someone round to fix the glass in the flat downstairs, and sort out the lock.’

  ‘I think they must have been. There’s a load of sawdust on the floor by the door to the flat. Maybe they’ve put on a mortise or something.’

  He turned on the grill. Already it was smelling good, garlic and spices and lemon. ‘They asked me how Mrs Mackenzie is.’

  ‘Haven’t they been to check on her?’

  He shrugged. ‘Didn’t sound like it. I rang up the ward after I’d spoken to them. No change. I don’t think they’ve got high hopes for her. And they’ve still not managed to track down a next of kin.’

  ‘Poor Mrs Mackenzie. I’ll go and see her next week.’

  We sat down to eat.

  ‘We should go somewhere again, now the weather’s warmer,’ he said, chewing.

  ‘Go somewhere?’

  ‘For a weekend or something. Just to get away from it all.’

  ‘This is yummy,’ I said.

  ‘We could go to Aberdeen. Or Brighton – we could go and have a weekend in Brighton, what do you think?’

  I didn’t answer.

  He stopped chewing and watched me, drinking from his wineglass. He was looking at me in that psychologist’s way he had: reserved, concerned, curious.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I’ve got such a lot on at the moment with work. I need to go through all those employment contracts with Caroline, and then there’s the therapy with Alistair, and I wanted to think about decorating the flat – ’

  ‘Hey,’ he said quietly, interrupting. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Stop pushing me away.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m not pushing you away, I’m just really busy, and – ’

  ‘Stop pushing me away.’

  I’d made the mistake of catching his eye, and I was lost. I stared at him, cross at first, just for a moment, and then melting. I didn’t want to do this on my own. I didn’t want to do it all without him.

  ‘The door, Mrs Mackenzie’s door…’

  ‘What about it?’ he asked, reaching for my hand.

  ‘I thought last night – you thought I did it. You thought I left it open on purpose. Didn’t you?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘It felt like you didn’t believe me.’

  ‘I do believe you, Cathy.’

  ‘Someone tried to break in. Downstairs. That’s why the glass was broken.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Why did you say it was the fox?’

  ‘I didn’t say the fox broke the window.’

  He was right – he hadn’t actually said anything of the kind.

  ‘Why aren’t you worried? Someone might have been inside the flat.’

  He shrugged. ‘Cathy, we live in London. Break-ins happen all the time. I got burgled when I was in Hampstead. My car got nicked two years ago, I never got it back. Ralph got mugged in Hyde Park once. This sort of thing happens all the time. It doesn’t have anything to do with Lee.’

  ‘But – ’

  ‘And whoever it was who broke the window, there was no sign of them getting in. The back door was still shut and locked.’

  ‘The flat door was open!’

  ‘You and I both know that latch wasn’t exactly reliable. The draught from the broken pane probably blew it open.’

  I bit my lip. This wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘It’s not Lee, Cathy,’ he said, gently. ‘He’s not here. It’s just you and me. Alright?’

  I cleared the plates away. While I was rinsing them and putting them in the dishwasher, I felt misery and general exhaustion. He stopped me, took the plate carefully from my soapy hand, made me turn to him. He tilted my chin up so I was looking at him, at his eyes.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘And I’m so proud of you. You’re brave and strong and bold. You’re braver than you think you are.’

  The tears chased each other down my hot cheeks. He kissed them away. He held me and rocked me gently, and after a while I forgot all about going downstairs to do the work that I’d pretended I had to finish. I forgot all about the broken glass, and the sawdust on the floor, and the draught of cold that blew around my ankles. I forgot about everything except him, Stuart, and the warmth of his hands on my skin.

  Wednesday 7 May 2008

  For another two weeks, everything was fine. The new warehouse had its official opening ceremony and all the supervisors and warehouse staff we’d recruited were busy finding their feet and doing really well. The CEO sent a letter thanking us for all our hard work.

  I had weekly therapy with Alistair and worked on getting the checking down
to nothing. I’d managed it a few times. When I did check, it was for the things that might have been moved in the flat. But after that night we’d found Mrs Mackenzie’s door open, there had been nothing. No noises in the night, no evidence that he or anyone else had been in the flat. Nothing at all.

  Stuart had been busy completing his research project and had been working late on it before getting home. I’d been sleeping in my flat so that he could sleep undisturbed when he got in. As a result, I’d hardly seen him all week.

  Caroline and I were enjoying a cup of tea and a chat, something we’d not had much time to do in the last few weeks. She was asking me about Stuart when I got a text:

  C – Forgotten what home looks like. Trying to get weekend off. Love you. S x

  A few minutes after that, my work phone rang. I half-expected it to be Stuart, but it wasn’t. To my surprise, it was Sylvia.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Sorry to ring you at work, but I don’t know your home number.’ Her voice sounded strange, an echo to it, and I could hear traffic in the background.

  ‘That’s okay. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘I’ve only got a minute. Would you meet me for lunch? Today?’

  ‘I’m a bit busy, Sylvia.’

  ‘Please. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  I glanced at my desk calendar – a meeting at 2pm, but I should be back well before then. ‘Alright, then. Where do you want to meet?’

  ‘John Lewis, Oxford Street – the coffee shop on the fourth floor. Know it?’

  It wasn’t the typical place you’d expect to see Sylvia, but her tone was so familiar – she expected everyone to move at her pace, meet her in her world, as if the planet revolved too slowly around her. ‘I’ll find it.’

  ‘Twelve?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘See you then. And Catherine – thank you.’

  Breathless at the end, still sounding as if she was in a cavern somewhere, she rang off.

  I thought about it all morning. It felt like a trap, but a clever one. I shouldn’t be afraid of meeting someone in a place like that – very public, busy, lots of entrances and exits, no way Lee could take me, difficult for him to follow me in and out. Unless she helped him. If she’d invited me round to her flat again, I would have refused.